CCE, the marketer, distributor and producer of Coca-Cola products in Europe, is utilising the carbon and tax analysis tool, TCOPlus, to accurately measure its carbon footprint and then monitor the improvement in performance to help achieve its objectives.

CCE currently operates around 4,600 leased vehicles in six main countries: the UK, France, Belgium, Holland, Sweden and Norway.

By using TCOPlus, the company calculates that, if it reduces the average carbon emissions of its fleet to 130g/km for all vehicles across Europe, it will make cost savings of €4.17m (£3.65m) over its fleet replacement cycle of four years and reduce its overall carbon emissions by over 3.6kl tonnes.

There are projected operating cost savings in three main areas: corporate taxes, fuel costs and driver’ benefit-in-kind tax charges, but the company has emphasised that carbon reduction, not cost savings, is its primary objective.

Wim Buzzi, CCE Category manager – Fleet, said: ‘We are optimistic of hitting our targets for a variety of reasons. Firstly, some 60% of our fleet are job cars, which means we can control the choice of vehicles for these categories and ensure they are the most carbon efficient available.

‘Secondly, we are promoting best in class vehicles to all our drivers to ensure that we are not selecting high polluters, and have confirmed a maximum carbon cap of 160g/km across Europe. And finally we are introducing eco-driver training, initially as a pilot scheme in the Benelux countries, and then hope to roll it out in all countries once we have demonstrated the savings that are available.

‘Fleet reporting in a standardized format across Europe has always been a challenge, but TCOPlus has proved invaluable in allowing us to measure out current carbon footprint on a country by country basis, and then allowing us to create a series of simulations to show what the effect would be of changing various vehicles within our fleet policy.’ added Buzzi.

Hans Damen (Inset), managing partner of TCOPlus, commented: ‘We are delighted that CCE is utilising TCOPlus in its objective of substantial carbon footprint reduction across its European fleet. Users regularly achieving savings of 15-20% and an ROI of many times their original investment and CCE looks like being no exception.’